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Missile Defense

Technology has always found its greatest consumer in a nation's war and defense efforts. Since the last attempts at a "Star Wars" defense system, has technology changed considerably enough to make the latest Missile Defense initiatives more successful? Can such an application of science be successful? Is a militarized space inevitable, necessary or impossible?

Read Debates, a new Web-only feature culled from Readers' Opinions, published every Thursday.

gisterme - 05:54am Oct 15, 2003 EST (# 15059 of 15067)

wrcooper - 10:57am Oct 13, 2003 EST (# 14868 of ...) http://forums.nytimes.com/webin/WebX?16@13.UsrvbnVpODi.2598826@.f28e622/16579

Will -

"...The NYT editorial stresses just the points I have been making in this forum. The bush NMD program is costlier than the actual threat warrants; it's technologically unsound and unproven; the components of the so-called "layered defense" have not been shown to work together. The principal radar to be used in the system isn't ready yet. The issue of counter-countermeasures hasn't been resolved. The argument for deploying the Bush system in such a hasty fashion has not been made..."

Your repost:

October 3, 2003

Wishing Won't Make Star Wars So

President Bush's rush order to begin fielding a costly, unproven system for ballistic missile defense by next September is proving to be riddled with risks for technical failures and budget overruns.

It is a developmental system. Technical failures are the way that you learn to achieve technical success. Budget overruns may or may not happen but if they do, I'd have to seriously weigh those costs against the savings in both human and fiscal terms of preventing the nuking of a city.

Congressional investigators have found the current state of antimissile technology hardly up to the actual threat.

Then we'd better get to work!

A detailed report by the General Accounting Office warns that the hurried attempt to blend 10 separate high-tech defense systems into one program is proceeding full speed ahead, as Mr. Bush ordered, but without adequate preliminary demonstrations that the pieces will ever work well together.

How in the world will you ever know if you don't try? Shall we wait until our adversaries can already kill us before we start?

Most pressing, a crucial Alaska radar system at the heart of the plan has not yet been shown to be ready for the job it is being adapted to do.

How can it be demonstrated before it's built??? Where did you find this article, Will?

Still, administration officials are stubbornly pushing ahead with plans to start opening 10 West Coast missile defense bases next year.

Gotta start somewhere. If he didn't do this when he could and the NK's or somebody else nuked a US city with a balllistic missile, then who'd be burned at the stake? Who would be found to be remiss in carrying out his constitutional mandate to defend American citizens?

They are betting that the technology can eventually be shaped to fit Star Wars, the bullet-hits-bullet dream first envisioned in the Reagan administration.

I think their odds are very good. This isn't a new program.

There is no belittling the true concern that rogue nations like North Korea are intent on developing ocean-spanning nuclear weapons.

That's a fact. That's why I'm glad we're not sitting on our hands.

But until the prodigious innovations of an antimissile defense have been clearly proved trustworthy, the nation is installing "no more than a scarecrow, not a real defense," in the words of Dr. Philip Coyle III, a former head of weapons testing at the Pentagon.

Dr. Coyle can think and say what he wants. Once the "scarecrow" defense is shown to work then I guess it becomes something else.

The investigators warn that the uncertainty and haste make it more likely that the system, once its pieces are linked, will balk when put to actual flight tests. This would mean more funds to try to fix the program, whose eventual cost is already tabbed at $50 billion.

Well, if pieces are going to balk, it's the actual flight tests where they'll do it. Of course, that is the purpose of acutal fight tests. Once again, we learn from our mistakes. This is nothing new.

Critics maintain that the president's timetable is as much about the next election — about homeland security as a political issue — as it is about a credible defense.

gisterme - 05:56am Oct 15, 2003 EST (# 15060 of 15067)

continued...

That seems like hogwash to me. The president has been supporting missile defense development since he took office and agreed to continue the Clinton program.

He still has a chance to deny opponents a political weapon by ordering more time and testing to show the system is workable.

If the President denies opponents a political weapon on this topic he's doing them a favor. It will keep them from shooting themselves in the foot. :-)

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New York Times on the Web Forums Science Missile Defense